People Like Us by Dominick Dunne

Author:Dominick Dunne [Dunne, Dominick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Psychological, Sagas, Family Life
ISBN: 9780517074626
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1988-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

It rained the whole Easter weekend at Merry Hill, and the men of the house party, except for Ezzie Fenwick, were put out that the inclement weather thwarted their sporting plans.

The Renthals had bought a house where, years past, a shooting had taken place. It had belonged to a family called Grenville, a name long faded from day-to-day usage, but, still, a name that recalled past glories. “This was once the Grenvilles’ house,” people would say about it, traipsing through the woods to look at the structure, boarded up, unwanted for several decades, since the scandal that rendered it unlivable. “He was going to leave her, and she shot him. Something like that,” they would say.

For the Renthals, however, who didn’t know the Grenvilles, had never even heard of them, other than a feint recollection of grandeur associated with the name, there was not a moment’s hesitation about buying the property when the only daughter of that sad family decided to sell. They liked owning things that had once belonged to grand people. At a Rothschild auction in Europe, Elias bought every bit of glass, china, silverware, and household linen with the letter R engraved or embroidered on it, more than enough to accommodate vast groups at both his enormous apartment in town and his new estate in the country.

Ruby was awakened early by the sounds of her maids arguing below with Lorenza, about vases. Temperamental and demanding Lorenza, in her miniskirt, had arrived early from the city to arrange the peonies and delphinium, and the forsythia and lilac branches in the downstairs rooms, and she always argued with the maids about vases. Far from being cross, Ruby stretched luxuriously and nestled into her linen sheets, enjoying hearing the bustle of a life below that was preparing for her day. She never took her new status for granted and always, in moments like these, when she stopped to notice, she said, to whomever it was one thanked, a short and shy prayer of gratitude. Then, glancing at her gold vermeil traveling clock, which had once belonged to the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, she knew, in her perfectly run life, that in nine minutes Candelaria would knock on her door with her tray, her mail, and her morning papers.

It had taken but one weekend at Castle Castor, the Wiltshire seat of the Earl and Countess of Castoria, for Ruby to learn most of the amenities of grand country life: bags unpacked by the butler, clothes pressed by the maid, biscuits and fruit and bottles of Malvern water on the bed tables, breakfast on trays for the ladies, breakfast in the small dining room for the gentlemen, and separate newspapers for all.

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